seiyuu3

Well they finally announced it - one of the hottest anisong events Animelo Summer is on this year and the official site is now open. A preliminary list of artists attending are already on the site - with familiar names such as ALI Project, Kuribayashi Minami, Mizuki Nana, Chihara Minori, Ishikawa Chiaki, JAM Project, Momoi Halko, Hirano Aya, and two new players GRANRODEO and angela.

This year’s key word is “Challenge” - and with that they are definitely taking some new organizational challenges by not only upping the venue scale from Budoukan to Saitama Super Arena (the capacity depending on layout can be up to double the size), but also splitting the concert into two days, with what appears to be different artists performing on different days. I’m a bit torn on this move - as much as I like the prospects of two days worth of awesome live performances of anisongs, I don’t like them leaving me no choices but to go to both days to see all the artists I want to see.

On a related note, one of JAM Project’s long time female member Matsumoto Rika broke news shortly after the closing of JAM Project’s domestic concert tour that she will no longer take part in JAM Project and JAM Project related events. While hopeful fans were praying that it’s a late April’s Fool, but the profile picture of JAM Project at Animelo reflected this change. It’s a big blow to JAM Project, especially that JAM Project is supposedly doing a world tour this year (and what’s up with that anyway? Hardly any news is out regarding the schedule). Otakon still has her listed as guest, but I guess it’s up in the air.

According to her latest blog entry, made on the 4th, RieRie has changed to an agency named リトリート (Retreat) effective from April 1st. A quick search on the netz turns up surprising little information on an agency with such a name. Now not so long ago, 2ch had threads (also covered by Canned Dogs)about a large amount of seiyuu leaving their agencies, and the one which suffered the most lost was Tokyo Actor’s Consumer’s Cooperative Society (Haikyo). The rumor has it that seiyuu Morikawa Toshiyuki is starting a seiyuu agency himself and invited many in the industry to join his company, and that the company’s name would be named sometime in April. RieRie’s new agency Retreat could very well be the agency in the rumor.

Currently, a lot of the old time seiyuu agencies are actually spinoffs from talent agencies. It’s not too difficult to imagine that the two sectors has different requirements and work rules, thus it makes a lot of sense that some of the old veterans whom are slowly moving down from the front line are now doing their part in helping the industry.

The Seiyuu Award committee comes out and announces that they will be selling postcard sets of the winners at the Tokyo Anime Festival. Postcards FFS. At least last year’s short drama CDs between the winners are an actual display of acting skills. Now this, this is just blatant merchandising.

Received V cards from the official fanclub on the day but only just got around to post it - Nana-chan is here to remind you all that you’re a lonely otaku!

Still, tasty Nana-chan picture is tasty. She is so edible in this picture that I must infer a line from “Cosmic Love”:

Amai chocolate mitai, hitori jimeshitai
like sweet chocolate, I want to have you all to myself

A current discussion thread on 2ch.

From Bandai Ent. USA’s official Code Geass page:

Taeko Chiba?

Still, probably a lot more forgivible then ADV’s HURAHI fisco.

I’ve talked about the Minamike’s seiyuu trio - Sato Rina, Inoue Marina and Chihara Minori’s manga effort here, and what do you know, they really are going to publish their work. From March this year, the Minamike radio show “Minamike no Minakike” will be collected and released in CD form, and according to the program’s site, the first pressing for the CD will come with the “Sensei and Ninomiya-kun” manga that the seiyuu drew. Not much else is known right know and checking the release schedule, it appears that there will be more than one CD for the program’s recording, so it’s unknown whether they are going to split the manga over the volumes or just release it on the first installment only.

Either way, I’m really interested in checking the manga out drawn by the three, plus I really enjoyed the radio show as well, so this should be a no-brainer purchase for me.

Picture taken from Amazon JP. Don’t ask me why the official page hasn’t got a decent size picture but Amazon does.

The complete tracklisting was also revealed:
1. Astrogation
2. COSMIC LOVE
3. Dancing in the velvet moon
4. Soratokei

Astrogation’s composer and arrangement is credited to Sumiya Jun. You can find some of his past works here. I think this is the first time him and Nana-chan has worked together.

2007 Christmas week sees two big seiyuu DVD releases - Yukarin’s concert DVD “Pinkle Twinkle Milky Way” and Minorin’s first music clip DVD “Message 01″. So how do they stack up and are they worth the price of admission? Read on.

First, Yukarin’s concert DVD set containing footage from the 2006 Christmas concert “Pinkle Twinkle Party” as well as this year’s summer tour “Sweet Milky Way”. After a few fumbles in the beginning, the past couple of years King Record’s concert DVD products has improved dramatically and has remained pretty solid - both in terms of the quality of the actual content on the disk as well as the presentation of the package. “Pinkle Twinkle Milky Way” keeps up with the trend, so what you get for 6,800yen is a massive 3 disk set in a 4 fold digi pack, a nice thick booklet containing pictures and interviews, and a hard cardboard box to house it all. Click on the second and third picture for large size photo.

Just looking at the pictures, you can tell that King Record really knows the people they are selling to. It’s all good and well that the package is pretty, so how about the actual content? Again keeping up with their recent effort, what you get is the concert recorded in anamorphic widescreen with linear PCM stereo sound - this is about as good as they can get without moving to HD disks such as Blu-ray or HD-DVD (FWIW, Suara’s concert on Blu-ray was beautiful, so I’m eagerly waiting for a Nana-chan or Yukarin concert on a HD disk). The video compression is also good, so visually it is nice as well, check out a few screen grabs below (click for full size):

Some of you might have read my ranting against the Haruhi Gekisou DVD at other places, for reference’s sake, here’s a grab from the Gekisou DVD, again click for full size.

Compare the crispness of the screen grabs, added with the fact that the Gekisou DVD was 4:3 letterboxed (with insane overscan compensation) and I think it should be clear that the Gekisou DVD was a damn mess. Not to mention the difference in price was only a mere 800yen and I think you can understand my beef with the Gekisou disk.

As for the content’s side, we’ve talked about Yukarin’s live performance enough here but it’s worth repeating - she sings well and her MCs are fun, so you do get your money’s worth.

Moving on to Minorin’s “Message 01″

The packaging is not fancy - only coming in a standard CD size jewel case, no big deal, but my first big disappointment was the 4:3 letterbox video despite the fact that the entire disk’s video was in widescreen! On the plus side though there were no major problems with the video compression, so not all were lost.

This is the second Lantis produce DVD that I’ve bought - Animelo 2007 being the first which had bad video compression - and judging from this disk it looks like Lantis could learn a thing or two from King Record. Other than that though, the content itself was quite substantial with 96 minutes of running time, off setting the original fear of a 3,000yen price tag for 3 PV clips. The documentary section makes up the bulk of it and it will take me some time to get through the entire disk, though quickly skimming through the footage I found some nice gems in there including videos of Minorin’s street live days in Akihabara, definitely worth watching to see just how far she had came. Included with the DVD was a bonus audio CD containing one track titled “Contact 13th”. My first reaction was to ripped it and add it as the 13th track to the Contact album playlist, then I replace the mangled album version of “Shinji no Tabi” with the full version from the DVD and gave it a few play through and all of a sudden it made the album seem more complete. Surprising how one or two tracks can make or break an entire album. As a side note, Lantis collaborated with the usual anime goods stores for extra goodies and Animate was giving out special posters:

When I saw the sample on Lantis’ special page I knew I had to get the disk at Animate just for this poster, and I have to say it is one of the better free posters I’ve got from Animate for a long long time. Now I’ll just have to decide whether I want to use this poster in place of the Junpaku Sanctuary poster currently on the wall.

In conclusion, Yukarin’s DVD is another quality product that is highly recommended to anyone having a passing interest in her music career. On the other hand, Minorin’s DVD would not disappoint hardcore fans, however I don’t think it will be as worthy of a purchase to non-followers compared to the Yukarin DVD.

Believe it or not, I’m actually not the type that follows seiyuu radio shows. However this season had me following the Minami-ke radio “Minami-ke no Minakike”. I’m not sure why I’m attracted to this particular radio show - it’s probably the random-ness of it, as each episode has no particular theme to it and it goes in all sorts of direction, and the adlib nature of the radio show resembles the anime itself. Of course it has the added attraction of having two seiyuu that I’m interested in - Inoue Marina and Chihara Minori, and I’m starting to warm up to Sato Rina as well.

One example of the random-ness of the show was when they talked about the show-within-show, the love drama “Sensei and Ninomiya-kun”, that the Minami sisters watches. Since in the anime there really is no story to this show, one of the seiyuu, Inoue Marina if I recall correctly, suggested that they could draw a shoujo manga of the show, and they can each take turn drawing a chapter each week. To keep it short, the idea got the go ahead and they are now serialising the manga, so to speak.

Originally they were doing it for fun and they weren’t going to show it to anyone, but since Inoue Marina is such an excellent drawer, Chihara Minori’s childhood dream was to be a mangaka and apparently Sato Rina is said to be a good drawer too according to her wiki entry, it turned into something they didn’t quite expected, so they’re now giving the listeners a glimps of it by posting a couple of sample pages from their manga.

First you have Sato Rina’s:

And here you have Inoue Marina’s:

The three of them joked about publishing it in one of the episodes, maybe at Comiket or package it as a special in the DVD or something, and who knows, maybe just like this little idea it may come true.

Detective Conan author Aoyama Gousho and Conan’s seiyuu Takayama Minami had announced their divorce yesterday, reports Sponichi.

The two had met in “YAIBA” - another work by Aoyama - more than 10 years ago, and they were married since May 2005.

This marks another high profile seiyuu related divorce after Yamadera Kouichi and Kanai Mika’s announcement just not so long ago.